Magalie Guérin is primarily known for her paintings, but also for the work that extends from them—drawings of paintings, ceramics based on shapes from the paintings, and more. Guérin’s interest...
Magalie Guérin is primarily known for her paintings, but also for the work that extends from them—drawings of paintings, ceramics based on shapes from the paintings, and more. Guérin’s interest in translation and iteration lent itself perfectly to the invitation from Process/Process: how might her painterly concerns occupy the space of print? For the artist, this was an opportunity to move beyond systems of her own making and work within new contours set by the collaborative process of screenprinting.
To create a basis for the print, Guérin merged the images of two paintings from 2023 and created a composite with an imbued history of painted marks. The print evolved, in close collaboration with printer Angee Lennard, as layers of film passed back and forth over several months between the artist’s studio in Marfa, Texas and the print shop in Chicago. Guérin worked on films additively and subtractively, just as she paints, and while the image composition remained fixed, what changed was the mark-making itself: the outcome of thinking in ink instead of paint.
The resulting fifteen-layer screenprint stages Guérin’s specific sensibility to color, pattern, form, and shape. Capturing the exploratory nature of the printmaking process, it also registers abstraction as a generative mode of suggestion across mediums. This locates Untitled (JP+CC2) into Guérin’s broader set of artistic concerns, which, in 2023 critic John Yau described as “the line between painting and drawing, between the original and the copy, and the space between seeing and comprehending.”